Under pressure ... A pensive James Hird watches the Essendon Bombers play the Brisbane Lions at Melbourne's Ethiad Stadium in May, 2013. Photo: Getty Images

When James Hird sat down to his 40th birthday dinner on February 4 last year, he might reasonably have reflected that his was a charmed life. Tall and fair, with the clean-limbed grace of a natural athlete, he had been one of the greatest players in the history of the Australian Football League. After making a smooth transition to the business world, he had returned to the AFL to coach Essendon, the powerhouse club with which his family had been associated for three generations. In sports-mad Melbourne, Hird was not just respected, but revered. With his wife and four children, he lived in a large, elegant house filled with art and fine furniture. People called him Sir James, or Gentleman Jim. He was, in a sense, a prince of the city.

During the celebration that night, Hird's phone rang. David Evans, a stockbroker who was then Essendon's chairman, wanted to see him immediately. Hird would later tell friends that as he pulled out of his Toorak driveway and headed for Evans' place, he was concerned, but not alarmed - he had no inkling of the size of the scandal about to rock the AFL, nor any idea that he would find himself at the centre of it.

Even now, six months into a year-long suspension from the game, the man once regarded as one of its best ambassadors isn't sure how things went so horribly wrong. "He keenly feels that he was done over, and I agree with him," says his solicitor, Steven Amendola, a partner in commercial law firm Ashurst Australia. "In my opinion, he was scapegoated."

Figureheads ... Hird with his former Essendon coach, Kevin Sheedy, before a clash with the Greater Western Sydney Giants in March 2013. Photo: fairfaxsyndication.com

Hird will be a prince in exile for almost all the 2014 football season. On March 14, the day the first match of the first round is played, he and his family are due to leave for France, where he will study for an MBA at one of the world's leading business schools, INSEAD (the European Institute of Business Administration). The campus is in the forest of Fontainebleau, an hour outside Paris. Graduation ceremonies are held nearby in the magnificent chateau that was home to Napoleon Bonaparte - someone else who knew a thing or two about exile - until his banishment to Elba in 1814.

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Financially, Hird isn't exactly doing it tough. He may be missing out on bonuses that would have come his way in the course of a normal coaching season, but Essendon - nicknamed the Bombers - has paid him his annual base-rate salary of about $750,000. The club is also contributing towards his $120,000 tuition fees.

Many of us would like to be punished that way, but friends say James Hird burns with a sense of injustice because he believes he has done nothing wrong. The sentence may be light, but he worries that his character has been permanently besmirched. "Reputations are hard won and easily lost, as he has found out," Amendola says.

Flying high ... in action with the Bombers in 1997. Photo: fairfaxsyndication.com

Essendon is one of the oldest and proudest clubs in the AFL. Founded in the early 1870s by well-heeled members of the Royal Agricultural Society, the Melbourne Hunt Club and the Victorian Woolbrokers, it has always had an aura of conservatism and respectability. But the day after Hird attended the hastily called meeting in Evans' living-room, news broke that the club was suspected of injecting its players with performance-enhancing drugs. Hird, who was not only Essendon's coach but its figurehead, was essentially accused of presiding over a systematic doping program.

The Seven Network's AFL broadcaster, Bruce McAvaney, was astonished. To him, Hird's name was synonymous with sportsmanship and an almost old-fashioned sense of decency. In his playing days, Hird had been famous for not only winning matches but raising their tone. "There was a nobility about him because he played with great courage, but fairly," McAvaney says. "He never took a cheap shot."

An investigation commissioned by Essendon into its so-called supplements program found "a disturbing picture of a pharmacologically experimental environment never adequately controlled or challenged or documented within the club". But after AFL chairman Mike Fitzpatrick received the interim report of an inquiry conducted jointly by the AFL and the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA), he acknowledged that neither Hird nor other Essendon officials had intended for players to be given prohibited or potentially harmful substances. Whether that ever actually occurred remained unknown; however, the club was deemed to have taken insufficient steps to avoid the risk of it happening.

Seen and heard ... Hird makes a statement to the media scrum assembled outside his Melbourne home on August 28, 2013. Photo: AAP

For the vague crime of bringing the game into disrepute, Essendon forfeited its place in the 2013 finals series, lost early-round selection rights in the next annual draft of young players and paid a $2 million fine. Hird had spelled out in an internal email that supplements given to players had to be safe, legal and approved by the club doctor, but the AFL ruled that his overseeing of the program was inadequate.

"There is still great support for him," says McAvaney. But there is anger and disappointment, too. Some of the AFL fans who regarded Hird as the epitome of all that was true and good about their sport now feel that they have been betrayed. McAvaney believes many others are confused. If Hird is innocent, as he maintains, why did he accept the suspension? And why hasn't he done more to publicly defend himself? For a few months last year, he couldn't step outside his front door without being surrounded by cameras and microphones, yet he rarely said more than good morning to the media pack. "The one thing a lot of people are waiting for is for him to sit down and present his side of the story," McAvaney says.

According to one of Hird's close friends, barrister Nick Harrington, there is nothing he would rather do. "He would like to try to vindicate himself," Harrington says. "The media want to hear from him, as do the public. But his club and the AFL don't want any more oxygen pumped into the story."

When I phone Paul Little, who took on the Essendon chairmanship after David Evans quit, he makes clear that the terms of Hird's contract give the club the right to muzzle him. "It would have to be very, very strongly controlled in some way," Little says to my request for an interview with Hird. For a start, the chairman would insist on the right to censor Hird's comments. "I can't have him talking about the AFL. I can't have him talking about ASADA. I can't have him talking negatively about key players in this, because that will just backfire on us." On the whole, Little says, "I have found it easier just to stop James talking than to try to control what he says. Rightly or wrongly, that's the way it has to be."

I mention that I would like to ask James Hird how he feels about the unexpected turn his life has taken. Little says: "I'm not sure how he could do that without embarking on some responses that might be good for your story but not good for us. You see, it's very difficult for James to speak without becoming very emotional."

As a footballer, Hird had preternatural poise, appearing unruffled in even the most pressured situations. "He's like a spirit-level," Martin Flanagan wrote in The Age. "The emotion of the game tilts and sways around him, but he's always in the middle, near the ball, often with the ball, a look on his face like that of a man who is utterly awake." Off-field, too, Hird has a reputation for coolness and composure, but his friends agree that the events of the past 12 months have taken a toll. "I saw it all first-hand on a very private, personal level," says Harrington, who undertook to help with this story after Hird declined to be interviewed because he is not permitted to speak freely. "I saw it behind the front door. I saw it late at night. There is a human drama behind all this."

Good times ... Hird with his wife, Tania, and children (from left) Stephanie, William, Thomas and Alexander in 2010. Photo: Fairfaxsyndication.com

Critics of Hird paint him as arrogant, self-important and self-absorbed. They say he is deluded in insisting that his role in the supplements saga is that of victim rather than villain. Evans and Essendon's chief executive, Ian Robson, both resigned. Why not him?

Opinion hardened against Hird when a woman who said she was the mother of an Essendon player phoned Triple M Melbourne radio in response to his announcement last August that he had taken out a writ against the AFL. She had always respected Hird, she said, "but to watch his press conference yesterday, it was all about him. It was all about 'me, me, me. How to protect me.' Well, who is going to protect my kid? Who is going to protect all the other players?" The mother added: "My son, who plays for Essendon, and who I entrusted to be taken care of, has basically been used as a guinea pig."

At Melbourne's La Trobe University, sociology professor John Carroll argues that the facts of the case have been distorted from the beginning by a "highly charged spirit of irrationality". He compares it to a miasma, the noxious atmosphere that settled over the players in classical Greek tragedies, and he suspects that when it lifts, Hird will be seen in a better light. "Charismatic, good-looking, brilliant and courageous as a player, highly intelligent and well-spoken, and a devoted family man - he made an obvious target for envy," Carroll has written. "... This affair was mainly about him."

His big ears stop him being male-model material but Hird is certainly an attractive figure: rangy and elegant, with wavy blond hair swept back from his forehead. His friend Rod Law, FOX Sports' director of television, used to say he was the only footballer he knew who looked as though he could play in a dinner-suit. "He's always had an almost aristocratic air," agrees Matthew Klugman, senior lecturer in sports studies at Victoria University and author of Passion Play: Love, Hope and Heartbreak at the Footy. "He could fit into a Wodehouse novel quite well. You know, the young heir."

If Hird has an ancestral home, it is Windy Hill, the football ground near Essendon airport in north-western Melbourne that was club headquarters from 1922 until a move to Tullamarine late last year. The Allan T. Hird Stand at the ground is named after his grandfather, a Victorian state director-general of education who played more than 100 games for Essendon in the 1940s and served as club president for six years from 1969.

James's father, another Allan, played for the club, too. In James Hird's memoir, Reading the Play, published in 2006, he explained that he had always known his destiny: "When I was 10, my father asked me what I wanted to do. I looked at him and said, 'I want to captain Essendon to a premiership, marry a blonde girl and live happily ever after.' "

Nick Harrington was an Essendon supporter long before he and Hird became friends. Harrington had watched from his front-row reserved seat as Hird carved out his dazzling playing career, not only leading the Bombers to victory in the 2000 grand final but winning all available individual medals, including the coveted Brownlow, and earning himself a place in the AFL's Hall of Fame. What continues to fascinate Harrington is the way Hird made it look so easy. Even if he had a whole posse from the opposite team thundering towards him - "sweating, panting, running hard" - he played the ball with such unhurried confidence that he sometimes seemed to move in slow motion. "It was as if he was in a different time-zone," Harrington says.

Hird and Harrington met through their sons, who are at the same school. Harrington tells me they chatted on the sidelines at junior sports fixtures, but didn't really get to know one another until last April, when Essendon's former sports scientist Stephen Dank made banner headlines by claiming that he had regularly injected Hird with Hexarelin, a peptide that is believed by some to increase human growth hormone levels and is banned for use by athletes by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Hird flatly denied it, but AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou said the coach should consider standing down.

Dismayed, Harrington contacted Hird and offered his help. "My spur to get involved was the total destruction of his name and reputation and, seemingly, his coaching career," Harrington says. "I thought he wasn't in any sense getting a fair go." On the playing field, Hird had had an uncanny knack of knowing where the ball was going before it got there. Says Harrington: "He said to me, 'When I ran out onto the football field and the team was behind me, I felt like I could do anything. I felt like I could take the whole game on. But with what I'm involved in here, I don't know what's coming at me or where it's coming from. The game is so different.' "

On Harrington's recommendation, Hird called Steven Amendola, a tough-talking industrial relations lawyer who had worked for the federal government in the bitter national waterfront dispute of 1998. Amendola was a Carlton supporter, but nevertheless agreed to act for him. "It was interesting in the sense that there's a lot of enmity between Carlton and Essendon," the lawyer says, "but you're there to do a job. And whatever I thought about the Essendon Football Club, I had a lot of time for him as a player."

Also approached to join the legal team was barrister Julian Burnside, best known as a human rights and refugee advocate. "I'll be very candid. I'm not interested in football," Burnside tells me. "I'd never heard of James Hird. I had no idea who he was." But once he had read the brief, he was firmly in Hird's corner. "I knew he was dead-keen to fight the thing and to clear his name. And in my view, if it had gone to a contested hearing, he would very likely have been cleared."

Hird had initiated Supreme Court proceedings to force the AFL to appoint an independent body to hear the charges against him. Instead, at the end of two days of negotiations at AFL House, he bowed to pressure to agree to 12 months' suspension. "James was acutely aware that Paul Little wanted to have the thing wrapped up before the end of last year," Burnside says. "And if James had made a contest of it, that was not going to be possible. After agonising about it - really agonising about it - he decided at the last minute that he would take the deal that was being offered."

Burnside sat through the negotiations with Hird and Hird's wife, Tania, herself a lawyer. The barrister says it wasn't until just before he had to convey Hird's decision to the AFL Commission that he learnt which way his client was going to jump. Burnside had scribbled the words "Yes" and "No" on a piece of paper and passed it to Hird. "Literally seconds before I was called on, he circled 'Yes'. When we left, Tania was in tears. She was so distressed. She really, really wanted to fight it."

The more Burnside got to know Hird, the more impressed he became. "I've been at the bar now for 38 years and I've never acted for someone I regard as so honourable," he says. "That's not something I say lightly, let me make that very clear. I've acted for some very good people."

Talking to Amendola, I ask his impression of how Hird is regarded in the community these days. What do people say when his name is mentioned? Amendola pauses. "Almost universally, they think my client has done something wrong," he says.

James Hird grew up in Canberra, his parents having moved there from Melbourne before he was born in 1973. One of three siblings - he has two younger sisters, Amilia and Katherine - he spent countless hours practising his footballing skills on the national capital's well-tended ovals. He also rode bikes, caught yabbies in creeks and swam in Lake Burley Griffin. The family lived at Reid, across the road from the Australian War Memorial. His father was a public servant and his mother, Margaret, a teacher. They plainly believed in raising well-rounded individuals: at different times, James had extra-curricular lessons in ballet, piano, acting and French.

Essendon's former football manager Danny Corcoran - who received a four-month suspension - has observed that Hird "was never the stereotypical 'get on the piss' footballer". He collects expensive wine, reads 19th-century European history, appreciates smart tailoring. At one stage, when he was the Australian face of menswear label Ermenegildo Zegna, he was rumoured to have 50 of the Italian suits in his wardrobe. This was untrue, but it reinforced the perception that he hadn't a blokey bone in his body. Kevin Sheedy, who coached him for his entire AFL playing career, remembers being asked to play a word-association game by the MC of a drought-relief fundraising night near Geelong. When the MC said "James Hird", Sheedy said, "Class".

Hird's grandfather had played a key role in Sheedy's appointment as the Essendon coach in 1981. A decade later, when Hird's playing career looked in danger of ending almost before it had started, Sheedy stepped in on his behalf. Hird had been selected by Essendon in the seventh round of the draft, then missed most of his first season with a knee injury. The match committee voted four-two to dispense with his services, but Sheedy, one of those in favour of keeping him, reportedly talked the others into giving Hird a reprieve. Sheedy said later that while he hadn't seen a future champion in the gangly teenager, there was something about him that had caught his attention: "He always had a ferocity for the ball."

Sheedy came to regard Hird as a footballing genius, the best player he had coached. But few would disagree with Hird's analysis that it was his personality, more than his physical attributes, that gave him the edge on the field. He hadn't been endowed with the strength or speed of some other players, Hird wrote in Reading the Play, but "I believe I am in the top 1 per cent of the human race for competitiveness". Those who know Hird say he is ruthless in his pursuit of excellence. He pushes himself "extraordinarily hard", says Corcoran. "And he sets extraordinarily high standards for the people around him."

This seems to be a family trait. According to Corcoran, there was no more demanding taskmaster than Hird's grandfather. "Tough," says Corcoran. "Mean. A hard, principled man. He always told me, 'We're an academic family. Education's much more important than football'. "

In 1996, the same year James won the Brownlow, he completed a civil engineering degree, graduating with honours. As he admitted in his book, he had no real interest in civil engineering but knew that gaining the qualification would please his grandfather: "His expectations helped me to make sure that I worked on all aspects of my life."

His determination to get ahead left a lasting impression on Gary O'Donnell, who preceded Hird as Essendon captain. "He knew where he was going," O'Donnell says. "He knew who to associate with as well. He was a sponge, continually learning, both at training and off the field. He was able to network with major supporters, the business people of the world, who were going to be able to improve him as an individual." Says Bruce McAvaney: "A lot of players get to the end of a great career and say to themselves, 'What next?' But James was always forward-planning."

Someone once joked that when Hird stopped playing, he could get a job running the United Nations. In the event, he spent the three years before he returned to Essendon as a coach working full-time at Gemba, a sports-entertainment consultancy in which he has a financial interest. The chief executive, Rob Mills, says Hird was a quick study, "very keen to develop his corporate and management skills", but that being James Hird was not necessarily an advantage when it came to dealing with clients. "It sometimes took a while for people to get over the fact that it was James and focus on what he was saying."

From the outset, Hird's playing career was injury-plagued. Foot fractures, broken ribs, a shattered knee cap, torn hamstrings, torn tendons, a punctured lung. And more. During a match in 2002, he collided with team-mate Mark McVeigh's knee and sustained a compound fracture of the skull and face, requiring a plastic surgeon to peel back his skin and insert eight metal plates. McVeigh naturally felt terrible about it, but says Hird could not have been more gracious: "He rang me from hospital a couple of days later and assured me that everything was fine. A total accident. 'Nothing changes, mate.' "

Arriving at Essendon as a 17-year-old, McVeigh had been grateful to Hird for taking him under his wing. "He put his arm around me and guided me through what can be a minefield at times, trying to make it in the AFL world," McVeigh says. "He was like a father-figure in a way, to a lot of us younger boys."

Hird has been estranged from his own father since his parents divorced, though Allan Hird seems to pop back into his life when he is most needed. He visited Hird while he was recovering from the face injury, for instance, and leapt into print to defend him a couple of years later, when Hird attracted a storm of criticism - and a $20,000 fine - for bagging a particular AFL umpire during an appearance on The Footy Show. Recently, Allan had a letter published in which he hit out at Paul Little, who had suggested in an interview that Hird would return to Essendon "a better person" after his suspension. Allan wrote: "I know that he is coping with his current adversity well. Knowing him as I do, I am confident he will continue to do so without gratuitous advice from others about how to behave."

Nick Harrington is equally sure that Hird will come through okay. "Last year he went to some pretty dark places," Harrington says, "because he was a little bottle on a massive sea and was not in control of what was happening." But now Hird is happier, feeling that things are getting back on track. Harrington points out that his friend is a fighter. "There's a kind of steeliness about him, and a toughness - I'm talking about a mental toughness. There's an elusive quality as well."

Harrington's words make me think of the way Hird effortlessly evaded his opponents on the football field. And also of his imminent escape to France. Soon he will be strolling among the oaks and beeches of Fontainebleau Forest, nursing his injuries and gathering his strength for his eventual return to the fray.

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